Monday, March 22, 2010

Using a cellphone to control a robot isn’t new, but Swedish tech company Enea Linköping is one of the first to link an Android app to a Mindstorms brain over Bluetooth. An HTC Hero is controlling two simple robots.

Of course, Android 1.5 doesn’t support the Bluetooth serial profile, so a hack is used: the phone sends out commands over WiFi,which are passed through a WiFi-Bluetooth tunneling app on a laptop before getting to the robots. So basically there’s a bit of lag. But hey, Android 2.1 has serial Bluetooth support. Android and Mindstorms seems like a match made in heaven.